Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives

Faith

Understand Your Catholic Faith or Lose It

by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

The announced title for our lecture
is, Understand your Catholic Faith or Lose It.

Before we go any further, however,
some explanation should be made of why we speak of losing the Catholic faith.
Strictly speaking no Catholic loses the faith. To lose something is to be
deprived of something you possess without intending the loss. We use the expression
losing the faith only as a loose expression for something which never really
takes place.

What then do we mean when we
say that persons lose their faith? We mean that they have abandoned their
faith. You do not lose anything deliberately. It is the Churchs infallible
teaching that once a person was baptized in the Catholic Church and had even
basic instruction in the true faith, he does not lose the Catholic faith.
We have to say he abandons it.

What does this mean? It means
that Catholics who abandon their faith do so culpably. They are responsible
before God for giving up the treasure of their commitment to the one true
Church founded by Jesus Christ.

There must be a reason for this
sobering judgment. There are two reasons. The first is that there are no rational
grounds for giving up ones belief in the truths revealed by God and taught
by the Catholic Church for two thousand years. The second reason is that God
will never be wanting with His grace to sustain a professed believer in the
Catholic religion. All of this was a prelude to our principal focus in this
conference, namely that we must understand our Catholic faith or risk the
prospect of losing it.

Teaching of Christ

Recall the parable of the sower
as described by Our Lord in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The sower went out
to sow his seed. It was all good seed. But it was not all good ground on which
the seed fell. There were four kinds of ground, and only the last soil produced
any yield.

The first ground on which the
seed fell was the pathway. It was hard ground and the seed remained on the
surface, just long enough for the birds of the air to come along and eat up
all the seed that had been sown.

When the disciples asked Jesus
to explain the parable, He told them, When anyone hears the words of the
Kingdom without understanding, the evil one comes and carries off what was
sown in his heart (Mt 13:19).

There we have it! It is both
that simple and that tragic. The revealed truth has been sown into our hearts
at baptism. But that was only the beginning. We must do everything in our
power to understand what we believe. Otherwise the devil will come along and
steal the faith from our hearts.

Understanding the Faith

What do we mean by understanding
the faith? We mean growing in our grasp of what we believe. I cannot tell
you how crucially important it is to know what we are talking about.

The core of Gods revelation
is the mysteries which He has shared with the human race. By definition a
Christian mystery is something which cannot be rationally conceived before
revelation, or fully comprehended even after being revealed.

Such are the mysteries of the
Holy Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Real Presence of Christ
in the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the Seven Sacraments.
Such too are the mysteries of Gods creating the world out of nothing, His
infinite love even to dying on the Cross for our salvation, His teaching on
the indissolubility of Christian matrimony, His command that we love one another
as a condition for a heavenly destiny, His prohibition of sexual experience
outside of marriage, His promise of heavenly beatitude if we serve Him faithfully
and His threat of everlasting loss of happiness if we reject His merciful
love.

It is one thing to believe these
mysteries. It is something else to grasp them. Concretely this can be expressed
in several words. We grow in our faith by making our faith:

more intelligible

more clear

more certain

more effective

more apostolic

more sacrificial

Each of these six qualities is
part of what we are calling growth in understanding the faith we profess.

More Intelligible.
What we believe are mysteries which only God fully understands. Even an eternity
in heaven will not give us a complete grasp of these revealed truths. However,
it is one thing to say that we cannot comprehend, which means fully understand;
it is something else to say that we cannot understand what we believe.

To grow in our understanding
of the faith means to make it more meaningful, more deeply grasped, more real
in our lives.

Take the mystery of the Real
Presence. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Protestants who separated
from the Catholic Church had no less than two hundred interpretations of Our
Lords words at the Last Supper, This is my body 
This is my blood. There is only one meaning to the Real Presence. It is Jesus
Christ. It is the Son of God who became the son of Mary, who died on Calvary,
rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is now on earth in every tabernacle
of every Catholic Church in the world. When we receive the Holy Eucharist,
Jesus Christ is in our bodies no less than he was in the womb of His blessed
Mother the moment she conceived Him at Nazareth.

In just two dioceses in the United
States, in less than two years, one hundred and four Catholic churches were
closed. By now a dozen reasons have been given for this tragedy. But at root,
the basic reason was the loss of faith in the Real Presence of thousands of
once believing Catholics.

More Clear. Growing in our faith also means growing
in the clearness of our understanding of the mysteries that we believe. Take
such a truth as sin, which we believe incurs guilt before God.

What a difference it makes to
know that sin is the source of guilt and know what guilt really is. The Catholic
Church has no doubt in this matter. Guilt means the loss of Gods grace. Every
sin we commit always deprives us, in greater or less measure of the grace
we possessed before we had sinned. On these terms, mortal sin is a loss of
sanctifying grace that we need to reach heaven. Venial sin is a loss of more
or less of Gods friendship, without losing the title to eternal glory.

Moreover, every sin carries with
it a debt of suffering which is incurred. Mortal sin deserves eternal separation
from God. Venial sin deserves a greater or less degree of what we call temporal
punishment.

Most people simply take for granted
that sin is sin. The global massacre of millions of innocent children every
year throughout the world; the legal protection of murder by one once civilized
nation after another; the silence of so many religious leaders about these
crimes - all of this is beyond human comprehension and certainly beyond human
explanation. One thing, however, we can say. There must be a massive blindness
of mind in the consciences of whole nations about Gods authority in the moral
order.

Our Catholic faith tells us that
God became man precisely to teach us what is right and what is wrong; what
is virtue and what is vice. If there is one area of faith that we must grow
in understanding it is how we are to use our wills in obedience to the will
of God.

More Certain. To be certain means to be sure that something
is true. Thus I am certain that I exist. I am certain that I live in the United
States. I am certain that Columbus discovered America. I am certain that if
I want people to love me, I must love them.

Is it possible for a person to
believe that sacramental, consummated marriage cannot be dissolved by any
human power on earth, and yet not be absolutely certain that this is true?
Not only is it possible but, in my judgment, this is the basic reason for
so many professed Catholics getting divorces and soliciting annulments. They
have not been absolutely convinced of Christs teaching that two Christians
who marry become two in one flesh and have His own guarantee of grace to persevere
in marital fidelity until death.

More Effective.
Our faith is not only a virtue in the mind. We define faith as the assent
of the intellect to everything which God has revealed. But that is not enough.
We are to put our faith into practice. We are to make it effective in our
moral lives.

As Catholics, we recognize the
bishop of Rome as the Vicar of Christ. We believe that he has supreme authority
to preserve and explain Christs teaching for all times. At the same time,
what do we see? We see the authority of the Holy Father widely ignored, even
openly rejected in circles that are professedly Catholic.

Pope Paul VI declared that contraception
is a grave sin against the sanctity of marriage. Yet in 1968, when he published
HumanaeVitae, the bishops of more than one nation met in solemn
session and decided to tell the people to ignore the Pope and follow their
own conscience.

Pope John Paul II declared, as
part of the Churchs infallible doctrine that women cannot be ordained to
the priesthood instituted by Christ. Again what happened? In one country after
another, theologians and even bishops have urged a reversal of this infallible
teaching.

We are saying that our faith
must become more effective. This is not rhetoric. It is painful reality. Why?
Because it requires humility of mind to believe and humility of will to do
what we believe is the will of God.

As a culture becomes more academically
sophisticated, Catholic believers must become more spiritually childlike.
Either we grow in this child likeness, which Christ told us is a condition
for reaching heaven, or we may advertise ourselves as Catholics but we become
Catholics only in name.

More Apostolic.
Nothing that we receive from God is to be kept just to ourselves. We are to
share Gods gifts with those whom He places into our lives.

Among the gifts of God, none
is more fundamental than the virtue of faith. According to St. Paul, Faith
is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that are
not seen (Heb. 11:1).

Is there anything more precious
that we can share with others than this gift of faith? It is the foundation
of everything the human heart can hope for. It is the proof that everything
in this world is only a means to reach that eternal home where Christ and
His Mother are waiting for us.

Without a second thought, when
we see a hungry person we want to provide some food. The month I spent sometime
ago in Calcutta, profoundly affected my whole life; thousands of people going
hungry and so many dying for lack of bodily care.

But the deepest hunger is not
for bodily food. It is the desperate need of the human mind for Gods truth.
It is almost twenty centuries since Christ proclaimed the Gospel to the world.
Yet to this day only a fraction of the human race has even heard that God
became man and died on the Cross so we might enjoy Him in heavenly eternity.

Our Lord told us that He will
proclaim us before His heavenly Father if we proclaim Him before men here
on earth. This is both a promise and a warning. It is not enough for us to
believe. We must labor, dare I say exhaust ourselves, to share the riches
of Gods truth with others. No one gets to heaven alone. Either we help others
reach their heavenly destiny by our apostolic zeal, or we risk our own celestial
destiny.

More Sacrificial.
I have saved this quality of growing in our faith for last because, in a sense,
it includes all the rest.

Sacrifice is the surrender of
something precious out of love for God. Unless it is precious to me, I cannot
really make a sacrifice. No two people are completely the same. We differ
immensely. In fact we define a person as an individual intelligent being.
We are all individuals because we are all different from one another in so
many ways.

But there are some precious things
that all of us have in common. Among these, none is more precious than our
own individual self-will. In a thousand ways that we have never calculated,
this desire to do my own will, as I want to do it, when I
want to do it, for as long as I want - is at the heart of our personality.

We are talking about growth in
the faith. It is not too much to say that we mature as followers of Christ
in the measure that we have learned to surrender this most precious possession
of our being.

Our Lord could not have been
more plain when He told us that we are His disciples if we take up our daily
cross and follow Him. What is this cross? It is the will of God crossing our
wills. We have urges and desires that are contrary to the will of God. We
have dislikes, even dreads, that God wants us to accept.

Our faith, therefore, is only
as sacrificial as we are ready to choose what God wants, whether we
like it or not.

Why Catholics Leave the Church?

We began our conference by making
the blunt statement, Understand your Catholic faith or lose it. There is
a painfully obvious reason for saying this. Never in the history of our nation
has there been such a loss of Catholics leaving the Church as in our generation.
A single large diocese in the Midwest reports a drop of ninety percent in
attendance at Sunday Mass. Under God, someone had better diagnose this religious
epidemic.

In my judgment the root cause
is that so many once believing Catholics have given up their fidelity to the
one true Church because they have not understood the precious treasure of
their faith.

We could here begin not just
another conference, but a two year series of lectures on the dissemination
of error among professed Catholics. All that we have said so far stands. Countless
once believing Catholics have abandoned their faith because they did not understand
what they presumably believed.

What we dare not ignore is the
widespread dissemination of untruth, masked in Catholic vocabulary, which
has penetrated our culture.

There is a second parable in
the same chapter of St. Matthews Gospel about the sowing of seed. It is worth
quoting in full:

The kingdom of heaven is like
a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were asleep, his enemy
came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. And when the blade sprang
up and brought forth fruit, then the weeds appeared as well. And the servants
of the householder came and said to him, Sir, did you not sow good seed in
your field? How then does it have weeds? He said to them, An enemy has done
this. And the servants said to him, Will you have us go and gather them
up? No, he said, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along
with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I
will say to the reapers: Gather up the weeds first and bind them in bundles
to burn; but gather the wheat into my barn (Mt 13:24-30).

No doubt the basic reason for
the massive drainage in American Catholicism is that so many academically
educated Catholics had not grown up in the understanding of their faith.

But there is a parallel cause
for this mass exodus of Catholics in our nation. It is the sowing of the weeds
of untruth and the cockle of pseudo-Catholicism in our society.

This sowing of error is one of
the principal themes of Pope John Pauls encyclical Splendor of Truth.
He condemns those who are claiming that the Church can only set down certain
moral intentions or generalities. They deny that divine revelation and the
Churchs teaching include specific moral imperatives. Such interpretation
is incompatible with Catholic moral doctrine. The Pope asks, what are some
professedly Catholic moralists saying about the Churchs teaching on sexual
and marital ethics. They are claiming that each person is to decide for himself
what is right or wrong regarding: contraception, sterilization, homosexuality,
masturbation, pre-marital sexual relations, artificial insemination. They
are defending abortion. The result of this moral iconoclasm is to reject even
the constant moral teaching of the Catholic Church since apostolic times.

Is it any wonder that so many
Catholics have given up their faith? The wonder is that there are still Catholics
who remain faithful to the teachings of Christ and the Church He founded.

Our Holy Father speaks of countless
consciences being blinded by the deluge of error that is flooding the modern
world.

The Vicar of Christ could not
be more specific. He includes Catholic universities and seminaries among these
sowers of error, with disastrous consequences in the lives of those who are
supposed to be Catholics.

What is the solution? It is nothing
less than an organized effort to re-educate people in understanding their
faith. This faith, we know, is no abstraction. It is the truth revealed by
God who became man and who identified himself as the Truth.

Christ tells us, If you abide
in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free (Jn 8: 31-32).

As we grow in the understanding
of our faith, we grow in our understanding of Jesus Christ. As we grow in
understanding Him, we grow in our freedom to love Him with all our hearts
and enjoy Him, already here on earth, with something of the happiness that
awaits us in eternity.